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Mixing Art and Religion for a Loving Reunion

Last Sunday, worshipers at the 11 a.m. service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco heard something unusual: a sermon delivered by Anna Deavere Smith, the award-winning actress and playwright.

Clad in white robes and standing between two flickering candles, Ms. Smith teased the audience that there would be some interactive elements: “I grew up in the black church so it’s Black History Month and I’m going to need you to be responsive.”

One of her chief themes was the search for “you.”

“Show of hands. How many of you have searched on Google to see what others are saying about you?” she said, pausing to absorb the crowd’s laughter.

It was the first homily for Ms. Smith, 61, who is also the first artist-in-residence at this Episcopal cathedral on Nob Hill. She is working on a play, to be performed at the cathedral on Feb. 17 and 18, that will explore the meanings of grace. She has also taken part in a series of public conversations for the Sunday morning Forum program; this coming week she will join the composer John Adams onstage.

In keeping with her iconic “documentary theater” style in which she interviews scores of people and brings their words to life by recreating their cadences and body movements, Ms. Smith has been talking to both members of the cathedral’s staff and the community for her performance. (Her interviews will be stored in the cathedral’s archives.)

Both Ms. Smith and the Very Rev. Jane Shaw, who became the cathedral’s dean in 2010, share a vision of bringing together art and religion, historically-linked pursuits that are sometimes at odds in modern America.

While Grace Cathedral has been very involved with art and artists (its AIDS Chapel features the work of Keith Haring, for example), art and religion can be combustible. In 2010, a conservative Roman Catholic group and members of Congress helped bring about the removal of a video clip of ants crawling on a crucifix from a Smithsonian exhibit — igniting fears that the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s had returned.

Having an artist-in-residence at a church like Grace is unusual, though not unprecedented. Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist and subject of the 2008 documentary “Man on Wire,” has filled that role at St. John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral in New York, for years.

Photo

Anna Deavere Smith at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Ms. Smith is now working on a play about the meanings of grace.Credit
Joan Marcus

“I hope I can be useful with Grace Cathedral, make it a place where an artist can get a commission and get paid for work,” said Ms. Smith, who is based in New York but comes to the Bay Area often. “It’s a win-win.” (The artist-in-residence program is financed by the Cockayne Fund.)

Last summer, Ms. Smith performed “Let Me Down Easy,” her play about health care, at Berkeley Repertory Theater. While she was in the Bay Area, Dean Shaw approached her about the cathedral’s desire to have a resident artist. Ms. Smith showed her a short script on the theme of grace — culled from interviews that Ms. Smith had done as part of her work on “Let Me Down Easy” — and the two hatched a plan to have Ms. Smith develop new work while at Grace Cathedral.

Her interest in collecting stories that deal with grace sprang from conversations about injustice and inequity — two themes that she said had been pivotal throughout her career. She has also had a longstanding personal relationship to Grace Cathedral, as she has lived in the Bay Area off-and-on for decades, first as a student at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and then as a professor at Stanford. This is the first time that she’s roaming the halls in an official capacity.

“I was actually confirmed here when I was a student at A.C.T. in the ’70s. I didn’t always really worship here, but I would come by and meditate,” she said.

For next week’s show, she said that she had been adding to the interviews done for “Let Me Down Easy” to “localize” the performance. But, mostly, she said, her artist-in-residence duties revolve around spending time worshiping at the church.

Ms. Smith’s skill as an interviewer was on display when The Bay Citizen spoke with her and Dean Shaw recently at the cathedral; Ms. Smith, at one point, took control of the conversation to ask why religion and the arts so frequently seem at odds.

In a secular time, Dean Shaw noted, artists are “suspicious of religious institutions.”

“I think people would be very surprised to hear you say that you’re Episcopalian,” she added.

“What would they think I’d be?” Ms. Smith asked.

“You’re a smart person. Why would you be religious?” parried Dean Shaw, in her clipped British accent.

Ms. Smith, however, did not take the bait. Calling religion “an extraordinary act of imagination,” she likened the experience of working on a stage production to the rituals in a church.

“And maybe that’s something I’d like to have a little bit more of, maybe that’s why I’m around,” she said.

Correction: February 17, 2012

An article last Friday about Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and playwright who has been named artist-in-residence at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, stated incorrectly the name of her play. It is “Let Me Down Easy” not “Lay Me Down Easy.”

rharmanci@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2012, on page A21B of the National edition with the headline: Mixing Art and Religion For a Loving Reunion. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe